Amazon S3

Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.

Introduction to Amazon S3

Benefits

Scale your storage resources up and down to meet fluctuating demands, without upfront investments or resource procurement cycles. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of data durability because it automatically creates and stores copies of all S3 objects across multiple systems. This means your data is available when needed and protected against failures, errors, and threats.Learn about S3 data durability »

Wide range of cost-effective storage classes

Save costs without sacrificing performance by storing data across the S3 Storage Classes, which support different data access levels at corresponding rates. You can use S3 Storage Class Analysis to discover data that should move to a lower-cost storage class based on access patterns, and configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to execute the transfer. You can also store data with changing or unknown access patterns in S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which tiers objects based on changing access patterns and automatically delivers cost savings.Learn more about the S3 Storage Classes »

Unmatched security, compliance, and audit capabilities

Store your data in Amazon S3 and secure it from unauthorized access with encryption features and access management tools. S3 is the only object storage service that allows you to block public access to all of your objects at the bucket or the account level with S3 Block Public Access. S3 maintains compliance programs, such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, EU Data Protection Directive, and FISMA, to help you meet regulatory requirements. S3 integrates with Amazon Macie to discover and protect your sensitive data. AWS also supports numerous auditing capabilities to monitor access requests to your S3 resources. Learn more about S3 security and compliance »

Easily manage data and access controls

S3 gives you robust capabilities to manage access, cost, replication, and data protection. S3 Access Points make it easy to manage data access with specific permissions for your applications using a shared data set. S3 Replication features manage data replication within the region or to other regions. S3 Batch Operations helps manage large scale changes across billions of objects. S3 integration with Amazon Macie automatically provides an inventory of buckets and continually evaluates your S3 buckets to alert you to any unencrypted buckets, publicly accessible buckets, or buckets shared with AWS accounts. Since S3 works with AWS Lambda, you can log activities, define alerts, and automate workflows without managing additional infrastructure.

Query-in-place services for analytics

Run big data analytics across your S3 objects (and other data sets in AWS) with our query-in-place services. Use Amazon Athena to query S3 data with standard SQL expressions and Amazon Redshift Spectrum to analyze data that is stored across your AWS data warehouses and S3 resources. You can also use S3 Select to retrieve subsets of object data, instead of the entire object, and improve query performance by up to 400%.Learn more about query in place »

Most supported cloud storage service

Store and protect your data in Amazon S3 by working with a partner from the AWS Partner Network (APN) — the largest community of technology and consulting cloud services providers. The APN recognizes migration partners that transfer data to Amazon S3 and storage partners that offer S3-integrated solutions for primary storage, backup and restore, archive, and disaster recovery. You can also purchase an AWS-integrated solution directly from the AWS Marketplace, which lists over 250 storage-specific offerings. Learn about the APN and AWS Marketplace »

How it works — S3 Access Points

Amazon S3 Access Points simplifies managing data access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3. With S3 Access Points, you can now easily create hundreds of access points per bucket, representing a new way of provisioning access to shared data sets. Access Points provide a customized path into a bucket, with a unique hostname and access policy that enforces the specific permissions and network controls for any request made through the access point.

Use cases

Backup and restore

Build scalable, durable, and secure backup and restore solutions with Amazon S3 and other AWS services, such as S3 Glacier, Amazon EFS, and Amazon EBS, to augment or replace existing on-premises capabilities. AWS and APN partners can help you meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and compliance requirements. With AWS, you can back up data already in the AWS Cloud or use AWS Storage Gateway, a hybrid storage service, to send backups of on-premises data to AWS.Learn more about backup and restore »

Disaster recovery (DR)

Protect critical data, applications, and IT systems that are running in the AWS Cloud or in your on-premises environment without incurring the expense of a second physical site. With Amazon S3 storage, S3 Cross-Region Replication, and other AWS compute, networking, and database services, you can create DR architectures in order to quickly and easily recover from outages caused by natural disasters, system failures, and human errors. Learn more about DR »

Archive

Retire physical infrastructure, and archive data with S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. These S3 Storage Classes retain objects long-term at the lowest rates. Simply create an S3 Lifecycle policy to archive objects throughout their lifecycles, or upload objects directly to the archival storage classes. With S3 Object Lock, you can apply retention dates to objects to protect them from deletions, and meet compliance requirements. Unlike tape libraries, S3 Glacier lets you restore archived objects in as little as one minute for expedited retrievals and 3-5 hours for standard retrievals. Bulk data restores from S3 Glacier and all restores from S3 Glacier Deep Archive are completed within 12 hours. Learn more about archiving »

Data lakes and big data analytics

Accelerate innovation by building a data lake on Amazon S3, and extract valuable insights using query-in-place, analytics, and machine learning tools. As your data lake grows, use S3 Access Points to easily configure access to your data, with specific permissions for each application or sets of applications. You can also use AWS Lake Formation to quickly create a data lake, and centrally define and enforce security, governance, and auditing policies. The service collects data across your databases and S3 resources, moves it into a new data lake in Amazon S3, and cleans and classifies it using machine learning algorithms. All AWS resources can be scaled up to accommodate your expanding data stores — without upfront investments. Learn more about building a data lake on Amazon S3 and AWS Lake Formation »

Hybrid cloud storage

AWS Storage Gateway lets you seamlessly connect and extend your on-premises applications to AWS Storage all while caching data locally for low-latency access. You can also automate data transfers between on-premises storage and Amazon S3 by using AWS DataSync, which can transfer data at speeds up to 10 times faster than open-source tools. You can also transfer files directly into and out of Amazon S3 withthe AWS Transfer Family — a fully managed, simple, and seamless service that enables secure file exchanges with third parties using SFTP, FTPS, and FTP. Another way to enable a hybrid cloud storage environment is to work with a gateway provider from the APN. Learn more about AWS Storage Gateway » , AWS DataSync » , AWS Transfer Family »

Cloud-native application data

Build fast, cost-effective mobile and Internet-based applications by using AWS services and Amazon S3 to store production data. With Amazon S3, you can upload any amount of data and access it anywhere in order to deploy applications faster and reach more end users. Storing data in Amazon S3 also means you have access to the latest AWS developer tools and services for machine learning and analytics to innovate and optimize your cloud-native applications.Learn more about cloud-native applications »

Case studies

Georgia-Pacific builds a central data lake based on Amazon S3, allowing it to efficiently ingest and analyze structured and unstructured data at scale.

Nasdaq stores up to seven years of data in Amazon S3 Glacier to meet industry regulation and compliance requirements. With AWS, the company is enabled to restore data while optimizing its long-term storage costs.

Sysco consolidates its data into a single data lake built on Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier to run analytics on its data and gain business insights.

Nielsen built a new, cloud-native local television rating platform capable of storing 30 petabytes of data in Amazon S3 and leveraging Amazon Redshift, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR.